The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I
Page 161
80–81 “Farewell”, | A word that echoes like a funeral bell: Keats: “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell · · · Adieu!”, Ode to a Nightingale 71, 73 (Crawford 2015 75).
Song (“When we came home across the hill”)
Printed in Harvard Advocate 24 May 1907, then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
3 The gentle fingers of the breeze: “the last fingers of leaf”, The Waste Land [III] 173. “fingers of surf”, Mr. Apollinax 13. “Fingers of yew”, Burnt Norton IV 7.
5 The hedgerow bloomed with flowers still: “the hedgerow | Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom”, Little Gidding I 14–15.
8 and the leaves were brown: Lewis Carroll: “In autumn, when the leaves are brown, | Take pen and ink, and write it down”, Through the Looking-Glass ch. VI (TSE: “one more thought for pen and ink!” Mandarins 4 1).
[Poems I 229–31 · Textual History II 564]
Before Morning
Printed in Harvard Advocate 13 Nov 1908, then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
The month after publication, the Harvard Lampoon printed a parody (reprinted Soldo 99):
Before Morning
(With apologies to T.S.E. of the Abdicate)
While all the east was wearing red with gray,
The bottles on the backstep turned toward dawn,
Bottle on bottle waiting for the day,
Clean bottles, milk bottles, bottles of dawn.
This morning’s bottles and bottles of yesterday,
Their contents drips across the steps of dawn,
Blobs of the fresh and curdles of decay,
Clean bottles, milk bottles, bottles of dawn.
Circe’s Palace
Printed in Harvard Advocate 25 Nov 1908, reprinted Cap and Gown: Some College Verse ed. R. L. Paget (1931). Then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
Title] Lemprière on Circe: “Celebrated for her knowledge of magic and venomous herbs · · · Ulysses, at his return from the Trojan war, visited the place of residence; and all his companions, who ran headlong into pleasure and voluptuousness, were changed by Circe’s potions into filthy swine. Ulysses, who was fortified against all enchantments by a herb called moly, which he had received from Mercury, went to Circe, and demanded, sword in hand, the restoration of his companions to their former state. She complied · · · For one whole year Ulysses forgot his glory in Circe’s arms.” Odyssey X; retold by Hawthorne in Tanglewood Tales (1853) under the heading “Circe’s Palace”.
12 stately and slow: Lionel Johnson: “Stately and slow, she went away”, The Troopship 6 (Crawford 2015 103). Whittier: “Stately and slow, with thoughtful air”, The Prophecy of Samuel Sewall 9 (Shawn Worthington, personal communication).
On a Portrait
Printed in Harvard Advocate 26 Jan 1909, then Adv 1938, Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
[Poems I 231–32 · Textual History II 564–65]
To J. Isaacs, 29 Dec 1948: the poem “is of course inspired by the Manet portrait” (La Dame au Perroquet, in the Metropolitan Museum, NY, since 1889). Harford Powel, Jr.: “Tinckom-Fernandez says · · · that Eliot saw a reproduction of it in an English book on French Impressionist art”, Notes on the Life of T. S. Eliot, 1888–1910 (Brown University thesis, 1954) 78.
2–3 restless brain and weary feet, | Forever hurrying up and down: Symons 108 on Laforgue’s art: “There is in it all the restlessness of modern life, the haste to escape from whatever weighs too heavily on the liberty of the moment, that capricious liberty which demands only room enough to hurry itself weary” (Mayer 47). TSE: “hurrying feet”, Marina 20.
2–4 feet · · · hurrying up and down · · · stands at evening in the room alone: “Paces about her room again, alone”, The Waste Land [III] 254.
7 lamia: OED: “a fabulous monster supposed to have the body of a woman, and to prey upon human beings and suck the blood of children”. Keats, Lamia (1820).
13–14 The parrot on his bar: “‘Billy M’Caw! | Come give us a dance on the bar!’”, Billy M’Caw: The Remarkable Parrot 17–18.
14 Regards her · · · eye: “‘Regard that woman · · · And you see the corner of her eye · · ·”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 16–21.
Song (“The moonflower opens to the moth”)
Printed in Harvard Advocate 26 Jan 1909, then Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
1, 7 Moonflower · · · tropic: OED “moon-flower” 2: “tropical climbing plant, Ipomœa alba, of the family Convolvulaceæ, which bears fragrant, white, trumpet-shaped flowers opening at night”.
7–8 tropic flowers | With scarlet lips: the flowers of the tropical Psychotria elata strikingly resemble scarlet lips.
Ballade of the Fox Dinner
Recited 15 May 1909. Privately printed for the Fox Club in Fifty Years: William R. Castle (1949) and reprinted in Soldo. The Digamma, or Fox Club, was an exclusive Harvard society with its own three-storey building. TSE was Treasurer 1908–09 (Crawford 2015 94–95).
Title Ballade: the ballade form (three stanzas and a shorter envoi) was popular among later Victorians and Edwardians.
6 Oblivious of bonds and stocks: the bankers’ panic on Wall Street in 1907 saw the share index fall almost 50 per cent from the previous year (Jayme Stayer, personal communication).
[Poems I 232–34 · Textual History II 565–66]
25 temporize: OED 4: “to arrange or make terms, to effect a compromise”. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (“white ribboners”) was founded in 1874, and led the way to Prohibition in 1919. Harvard had its own Temperance Society in the 19th century (Jayme Stayer), and Cambridge became a “dry” city in 1886 (see note to WLComposite 2). demon Rum: used generically for alcohol. O. Henry: “‘demon rum’—as the white ribboners miscall whiskey”, The Trimmed Lamp (1907).
Nocturne
Published in Harvard Advocate 12 Nov 1909. After being reprinted in Adv 1938, the poem appeared in a non-Harvard publication, Time 2 Jan 1939, against TSE’s wishes. Then Adv 1948, Undergraduate Poems, Early Youth (1950)+.
Moody 18–19: “Laforgue could rewrite Hamlet · · · with the ironic condescension of one who knows it all. His Hamlet reflects that at least he has saved Ophelia from a life worse than death; and then is himself saved from the banalities of a passionate elopement when Laertes stabs him. Eliot, in Nocturne, applied that treatment to Romeo and Juliet.” (For Laforgue’s Hamlet, see note to Preludes I 13 and related notes.)
1 Romeo, grand sérieux: “Are we then so serious?” Conversation Galante 18 (with “nocturne”, 8; and “moon”, 1).
2 Guitar and hat in hand: Symons 109 on Laforgue: “He composes love-poems hat in hand, and smiles with an exasperating tolerance before all the transformations of the eternal feminine.” TSE: “Waits, hat and gloves in hand”, Spleen 13. “hat in hand”, Suite Clownesque IV 6.
7–8 Behind the wall I have some servant wait, | Stab: for such uses of “have”, see note to “You have the scene arrange itself”, Portrait of a Lady I 2.
First Caprice in North Cambridge
Published in March Hare.
Dated Nov 1909 in Notebook.
Title Caprice in: preposition perhaps coloured by a musical key (such as Caprice in C). Symons has a poem Caprice, Théodore de Banville Les Caprices, and Verlaine, Caprices I–V. W. D. Howells’s Caprice was reprinted in A Vers de Société Anthology ed. Carolyn Wells (1907). For musical titles see note to the title Preludes. North Cambridge: the distinctly non-Harvard part of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[Poems I 234–35 · Textual History II 566]
1 A street-piano, garrulous and frail: John Davidson, To the Street Piano (1894); see note to Preludes II 1–4. TSE: “when a street-piano, mechanical and tired | Reiterates some worn-out common song”, Portrait of a Lady II 39–40. (First Debate between the Body and Soul has “street-pianos through the trees” four times.) Laforgue has Complainte de l’orgue de Ba
rbarie [Complaint of the Barrel-Organ] and Autre complainte de l’orgue de Barbarie. Symons: “Enigmatical, tremulous, | Voice of the troubled wires · · · Wail to me”, The Barrel-Organ 1–4 (TSE: “voices · · · wail”, 4). W. G. Tinckom-Fernandez’s The Street Organ (Harvard Advocate 25 June 1908) had “spring shyly taps the window-pane” (TSE: “against the panes · · · windows”, 2–3). For Tinckom-Fernandez, see note to Cousin Nancy 2. street- · · · garrulous: “Along the city streets · · · garrulous waves of life”, Silence 1–3.
1–3 -piano · · · frail · · · yellow evening · · · windows: Verlaine: “Le piano que baise une main frêle · · · le soir rose et gris · · · la fenêtre” [The piano that a frail hand kisses · · · the evening rose and grey · · · the window], Romances sans paroles [Romances without Words] V.
1, 4 garrulous and frail · · · wail: John Gray: “wail · · · tremulous and frail”, Sonnet: Translated from Paul Verlaine (1890). garrulous and frail: Laforgue: “Les Jeunes Filles inviolables et frêles” [the frail inviolable Young Ladies], Dimanches: C’est l’automne [Sundays: It’s Autumn] 9 (see note to Easter: Sensations of April I 13–14). TSE to Paul Elmer More, 2 June 1930: “having met the mild blond garrulous and frail stripling Tate, your news made me explode with laughter”. frail · · · evening flung · · · voices: Hardy: “At once a voice arose · · · In a full-hearted evensong · · · An aged thrush, frail · · · thus to fling his soul”, The Darkling Thrush 17–23. For Hardy, see headnote to Opera.
1–8 garrulous and frail · · · children’s · · · grass · · · sparrows: John Gray: “The garrulous sparrows · · · child · · · grass”, Poem (1893).
2 The yellow evening flung against the panes: “When the evening is spread out against the sky”, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 2 (with “yellow · · · panes”, 15, 16). yellow evening: “a sunset yellow and rose”, Second Caprice in North Cambridge 17. “evening yellow and rose”, Portrait of a Lady III 32.
2–3 flung against the panes · · · windows: Van Wyck Brooks: “if humour is discredited · · · it will have its fling at the windows”, The Wine of the Puritans 103. TSE: “window · · · Flung their smoke”, The Waste Land [II] 90, 92.
2–10 evening · · · mud and grass · · · Delve in the gutter with sordid patience: “Rocks, moss, stonecrop · · · at evening, poking the peevish gutter”, Gerontion 12, 14. sparrows · · · gutter with sordid: “The thousand sordid images · · · And you heard the sparrows in the gutters”, Preludes III 4, 9 (for “images”, see note to 7). gutter with sordid patience · · · considerations: “gutters · · · With senile patience | The withered leaves | Of our sensations”, First Debate between the Body and Soul 3–7. “reverberation · · · With a little patience”, The Waste Land [V] 326, 330. with sordid patience: Paradise Lost II 569: “With stubborn patience”.
4 children’s voices: see note to “Children’s voices in the orchard”, Landscapes I. New Hampshire 1.
4–6 voices · · · broken glass · · · grass: “Our dried voices · · · As wind in dry grass | Or rats’ feet over broken glass”, The Hollow Men I 5–9.
6 Trampled: Shelley: “Would trample out, for any slight caprice”, The Cenci III I 235 (TSE’s title: Caprice).
7 A heap of broken barrows: “A heap of broken images”, The Waste Land [I] 22.
[Poem I 235 · Textual History II 566]
11 minor considerations: to Aiken, 30 Sept 1914: “sometimes I think—if I could only get back to Paris · · · I’m in the worry way now. Too many minor considerations. Does anything kill as petty worries do?” Laforgue: “Je me sens fou d’un tas de petites misères” [I’m driven mad by a heap of little miseries], Complainte d’une convalescence en mai 13.
Second Caprice in North Cambridge
Published in March Hare.
Dated Nov 1909 in Notebook.
1 This charm of: Tennyson: “this charm | Of woven paces”, Merlin and Vivien 327–28. Paradise Lost IV 651–52: “With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun | On this delightful land”.
1, 7 vacant lots · · · bricks: Virginia Woolf on TSE: “His father was a brick merchant in St Louis; & they lived in the slums among vacant lots”, Diary 10 Sept 1933. TSE: “my father, from filial piety, did not wish to leave the house that he [William Greenleaf Eliot] had built · · · so it came to be that we lived on in a neighbourhood which had become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess · · · for nine months of the year my scenery was almost exclusively urban, and a good deal of it seedily, drably urban at that. My urban imagery was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed”, The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet (1960). “In the vacant places | We will build with new bricks”, Choruses from “The Rock” I 79–80. For “vacant lots”, see Preludes IV 16 and note.
1–17 This charm of vacant lots · · · tins in piles · · · December · · · sunset yellow and rose: Henry James: “the red sunsets of winter · · · boards and tin and frozen earth · · · loose fences, vacant lots · · · as the afternoon closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness”, The Bostonians ch. XX.
2–4 fields that lie · · · eye: Milton: “climes that lie | Where day never shuts his eye, | Up in the broad fields of the sky”, Comus 977–79.
3–4 Sinister, sterile · · · Entreat the eye: Job 24: 21: “He evil entreateth the barren that beareth not” (with “his eyes”, 24: 24). Entreat the eye: Romeo and Juliet II ii: “Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, | Having some business, do entreat her eyes | To twinkle in their spheres till they return.” TSE remarked “some artificiality” there: “For it seems unlikely that a man standing below in the garden, even on a very bright moonlight night, would see the eyes of the lady above flashing so brilliantly as to justify such a comparison”, Note added to Poetry and Drama (1951) as reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, adapted from The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse (1937, 1950).
6–7, 9 tins · · · bricks · · · Far from our definitions: “such words as ‘world’ or ‘self’ denote objects which are by no means simple · · · Towards objects of this type there are two points of view which seem to me mistaken. One is to hypostasise them, to treat them as more real, or as manifestations of a higher reality, than such objects as bricks and tin cans”, Comments on T. H. Green (c. 1914).
[Poems I 235 · Textual History II 566–67]
7–8 Shattered bricks and tiles | And the debris of a city: C. F. G. Masterman: “broken bottles, and the refuse of the city”, From the Abyss (1902) 12. (For Masterman’s social study see note to the title Easter: Sensations of April.) bricks and tiles: Verlaine: “Briques et tuiles, | O les charmants” [bricks and tiles, | O the charm of them], Walcourt 1–2 (TSE: “charm”, 1, 14).
9 definitions: recognising the etymology. The title-page of Notes towards the Definition of Culture has the epigraph: “DEFINITION: 1. The setting of bounds; | limitation (rare)—1483 | —Oxford English Dictionary”.
14, 16–17 charm · · · evening · · · sunset yellow and rose: Tennyson: “The charmèd sunset lingered low adown | In the red West · · · rosy flame”, The Lotos-Eaters 19–20, 26.
Opera
Published in March Hare.
Dated Nov 1909 in Notebook.
Nietzsche deplored opera while praising Tristan und Isolde. “The man incapable of art · · · dreams himself into a time when passion suffices to generate songs and poems: as if emotion had ever been able to create anything artistic. The postulate of the opera is a false belief concerning the artistic process, in fact, the idyllic belief that every sentient man is an artist”, The Birth of Tragedy §19. TSE on Hardy: “He seems to me to have written as nearly for the sake of ‘self-expression’ as a man well can · · · interested not at all in men’s minds, but only in their emotions; and perhaps only in men as vehicles for emotions. It is only, indeed, in their emotional paroxysms that most of Hardy’s characters come alive · · · a refined form of torture on the part of the writer, an
d a refined form of self-torture on the part of the reader”, After Strange Gods 54–56. However: “It should be mentioned somewhere that I became dis-satisfied with After Strange Gods, which I came to consider rather intemperate, especially in speaking of Thomas Hardy, and no longer keep in print in this country”, Northrop Frye corrigenda (1963).
[Poems I 235–36 · Textual History II 567]
1 Tristan and Isolde: Ackroyd 38: the poem “seems to have been written after he had seen a performance in Boston · · · When he was in his sixties he discussed this opera with Stravinsky, and from that conversation Stravinsky inferred that it must have been ‘one of the most passionate experiences of his life’”, quoting Igor Stravinsky, Memories of T. S. Eliot in Esquire Aug 1965. Jean Verdenal to TSE, 5 Feb 1912: “Tristan et Y., du premier coup vous émeuvent atrocement, et vous laissent aplati d’extase, avec une soif d’y revenir” [Tristan and Isolde is terribly moving at the first hearing, and leaves you prostrate with ecstasy and thirsting to get back to it again]. TSE was to see it again at the Boston Opera in Dec 1913 (Crawford 2015 197). TSE phrases from the opera appear in The Waste Land [I] 31–34 and 42. TSE on Laforgue: “It is noticeable how often · · · such philosophical terms from the vocabulary of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the Valkyrie, and such properties from the dramas of Wagner, recur. Laforgue is the nearest verse equivalent to the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Hartmann, the philosophy of the unconscious and of annihilation, just as Wagner is the nearest music equivalent to the same philosophies, though apart from this approximation to a similar philosophic mood, it would be difficult to say what there is in common between Wagner and Laforgue. But in Laforgue there is continuous war between the feelings implied by his ideas, and the ideas implied by his feelings. The system of Schopenhauer collapses, but in a different ruin from that of Tristan und Isolde”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 215 (Clark Lecture VIII).